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Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

My solution is simple: When I feel like I have a lot of tabs [0], I close all of them. What happens when I close a tab I wanted open? I use browser history.

Browser history is one of those things that I feel most people don’t use enough. It’s easy to search, it contains everything you visited, and (for the macOS/iOS ecosystem at least) is synced across devices. A quick cmd-Y and search makes for a very efficient user experience for me.

[0] A “lot” is typically 10-20. I close all of my tabs probably 5-10 times during a typical work day.

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It took me a very long time to learn this. I always had multiple hundred of tabs open, until the day I decided to stop caring about it and let them all go. I almost never actually used old open tabs, just refused to close them, by fear of missing something. That’s in fact not true, I now close all of them at the end of the day and start fresh every morning. Anything I have to keep from one day to the other is written down in my daily notes, but it’s really a small amount. Or I just use the history, as you said.

People say it’s a bookmarking issue, I personally think it’s driven by fear of missing out, which isn’t really something solved by tools.

how does one learn this power and enlightenment? I easily have over a thousand tabs open across several browsers. Sometimes I go back to review them and am gladly surprised. Or sometimes I don't remember why I was looking at a thing, but it's still interesting.

> how does one learn this power and enlightenment?

Right click the tab you're on right now, left click 'close other tabs'. Exhale.

I'm still in the process of letting go of my attachment to tabs, but I can share with you some things that have worked for me:

- I've realized that, even though I have a lot of interesting tabs/bookmarks, most of them won't tangibly improve my life immediately. - I've created a special tag in Firefox that I use to mark bookmarks that I want to specifically come back to read later, called "to-read" - this helps my brain rest easy because it knows that it's saved somewhere. - Attachment to tabs is an emotional problem - the Fear Of Missing Out. I'm learning to treat this FOMO the same as my social FOMO - "Will I miss this tab after it's bookmarked and closed?" is somewhat similar to "Do I need to go to every single social event?" - no. - I sort my bookmarks into a deep hierarchy of folders and review them occasionally - this tells my brain that I will eventually come back to a bookmarked site, which makes it much easier to close the tab.

Don't downplay the sheer satisfaction you get from closing every single tab at once via the context menu.

I often use Firefox's "close tabs to the right" (I'm certain this is available in other browsers too) multiple times daily.

Note for the would-be-users of this approach: Chrome does not save your history infinitely, it only saves the last 90 days. I use an extension called Tabs Outliner to get around this problem.

Firefox, on the other hand, will save history until your storage runs out!

Wait, that explains why my Chrome history (at work, which doesn't allow Firefox) keeps disappearing! What an anti-feature.

This resonates with me. I also learnt the hard way to simply close all the tabs and then re-assess history if I really want to access the tab. On that note: sometimes I also just use OneTab [0] if my tabs are important but are hogging the system's performance.

[0] - https://www.one-tab.com/

This is what I do as well. For me, a lot is 7.

I do re-open closed tabs from the recently closed tabs list from every once in a while. Maybe 5 or so times a week.

Going into history is pretty rare, but sometimes happens. I probably do not need to do that even once a season/quarter.

This is the way

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